Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Useful SharePoint Designer Activities and SharePoint Designer 2010

It did not come as a surprise that Microsoft has added functionality into SPD 2010 that some of the activities created as a part of my open source project on CodePlex accomplished. At this year’s SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas I made it a point to go and check out some of the SPD 2010 sessions. I was pleasantly surprised by the new functionality that was added to SPD and you got to love the ribbon interface. On a sad note the most popular set of activities on the CodePlex project, the Permission Activities, are now available out of the box. There was a moment during one of the SPD 2010 demos when the guy said “and now we are going to set permissions on this item” I thought to myself “Oh, well, I’m just going to have to find another niche for the open source project”. From what I saw not all of the functionality provided by my project is in SPD 2010. For instance, “Start another workflow” is not part of the new functionality. Once I get my hands on a stable Beta of WSS and SPD 2010 I will create a roadmap for the still needed custom activities that may be implemented in the next version of the Useful SharePoint Designer Activities Project. Stay Tuned.

Please keep your SPD Activities project alive. We are constantly being asked for the ability to set item permissions in workflows. We won't see the Sharepoint 2010 upgrade at large clients until 2012 and I'd hate to not have this functionality for another two years. FYI, I revised your codebase so that the Grant Permission action iterates through all users in the field instead of just trying to set one. Seems to be working OK.

I have been using your SPD Workflow solution at my company for over 2 years now. Not being a developer it was the only way we could have gotten our requirements met in so short a time. Even if SP2010 has the same functionality, you saved a lot of people a lot of headache over the years, and for that I say thank you.

I just implemented this for our MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 installation and it works great. Excellent tool. I wanted to make a form for my customer using SharePoint Designer workflow and this allowed me to meet user requirements. Thank you.

Your extended workflow activity is wide use in our environment. Now that we are upgrading to 2010 I was able to deploy successfully. However now that I am trying to test in SPD2010 I see the activities but I can't enter the activity as an activity.

I can't understand why Microsoft don't make the same large set of workflow actions for work with Office documents, query web services and so on. Except approval workflows there a lot of other real tasks that can be automated with SharePoint workflow.

Hi Thank you for your excellent contribution. Onthe downside, this has been heavily used widely but there is not upgrade plan or guidance for 2010. If you could do that, would helpful to all your user community

Is there any documentation on getting the HTTP File Attachment working correctly in WSS 3.0 and/or MOSS (i.e. exact value to use for URL (absolute Encoded URL does not work, I get 404 error), exact value to use for Name (Name for Forms is what i have been told to use), and I have heard when using HTTP Action (for those that got it to work)it also seems to corrupt the document attached to the email and loses it's extension)? I have no problem using the List Attachment, but the HTTP Attachment action does not work and is what my client want's to use. I see no documention on Codeplex for the particulars of this HTTP File attchment action in Codeplex.

I know your WF package for SP2007 has been out for awhile now and we have just recently incorporated this into our production env. It is something we have needed for awhile now.

One question I have (you may have already touched on this) for the "lookup user info" action, have you been able to add the ability to look up info for multiple users selected in one person or group column?

Hello - Thank You for the Useful Sharepoint Designer Activities solution. I downloaded the file, and when I run the Setup.exe file I receive two error validations. First one indicates that Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 is NOT installed, the second one is that it "Could not find the specified solution file "DP.Sharepoint.Workflow.wsp"". Any help with these errors would be appreciated! Thanks

Paul: I have used your Workflow solution for a while. I have a new SP2016 install and I added your solution and have been able to use it with no issues. Then I needed to create a new Web Application on the server. At first I forgot to add the solution to the web application and I created workflows that were giving me an error.

Workflow Send Email was canceled by System Account. Failed to Start.

Then I remembered that I needed to deploy the solution. I did that and I restarted the server. I deleted the old workflow and re-created it, but I am still getting the same error. The solution works on the other web site and everything is fine. Not sure why the error. Have you heard of this before or did I miss something else? Everything is on the same server / same farm, etc.Let me know if you (or anyone else) has heard of this issue.